Monday, August 20, 2012

Library Trend: Linked Data

There’s been a lot of talk about Linked Data in libraryland recently. In response to this growing trend, we’ve gathered the following information for CLIC library staff who are interested in learning more about Linked Data.

Minitex and the Minnesota Library Association are also tackling Linked Data, and they invite Minnesota library staff to join their Linked Data interest group. If you would like to join the group or learn more about it, please contact either Sarah Weeks at Rolvaag Library, St. Olaf (weekss@stolaf.edu or 507-786-3453)or Sara Ring at Minitex (ring0089@umn.edu or 612-625-6088). There will be a Linked Data dinner at the MLA Annual Conference (tentatively Thursday, October 4) as an informal kick-off for the interest group. Minitex also plans to host a regional informational session which will be announced later this year.

At the national level, ALA LITA/ALCTS has a Linked Data Interest Group, and the Digital Library Federation sponsors the LOD-LAM Zotero Group, a shared vehicle for providing links and references to tools and resources about library linked data.

Additional Linked Data Resources

The following Linked Data Projects are from Sara Ring’s and Sarah Weeks’ Linked Data handout from their ARLD presentation earlier this year (thanks Sara and Sarah!).

Schema.orgGoogle, Bing and Yahoo adoption of the Semantic Web. Use Schema.org’s vocabulary to tag your data in a way that search engines can understand.

CKAN An open-source data portal. Lists 52 Library Data Sets (such as the British National Bibliography and Cambridge University)

VIAFVirtual International name authority file. VIAF is hosted by OCLC, and a joint project of several national libraries.

id.loc.govNames, places and subjects published as URIs with links to other national libraries.

EuropeanaAn aggregate of cultural heritage object from through- out Europe, containing 15 million items from 1500 libraries, museums, and archives.